On Reading and Other Esoterica
There’s nothing like coming across a writer who draws you in, whether by subject or phrasing, the humor and insight, all of it–they just have that eagle-eyed talent at observation. You’ve been let in on a secret, feel smug about it–and now you can walk away with your own glow from basking in their sunlight. All well and good, (and when is it ever both well and good?). However, other than entertaining yourself for a few days–or weeks if it’s stretched–to what use can it be applied?
Of course, if it is an instruction on how to fly a vertical liftoff jet, or how to lose 100 pounds in 100 days, that’s different.
After reading an enjoyable book, I don’t so much have a light bulb going off–let alone fireworks–as I have this impossible twitch to write. I should be satisfied with time not spent playing solitaire, get off my butt and take Layla for a walk.
Setting down a book when you hit the last page ought to be an important moment, satisfying even. Sticking the landing means the author has done her work. Pause, let it sink in, then take a walk, halting every foot or two so Layla can inspect the new spring grass. She comprehends more of the wild life around us than I can, all by means of her nose.
Occasional thefts are allowed, provided the author owns up. Imitations are acceptable if done cleverly; misappropriations are not. And for god’s sake, stick the landing, please.
I should have finished writing the fantasy novel begun in my teens–not necessarily because it was nearly as good as Lord of the Rings, but I inked a detailed map on vellum, named the cities, rivers, mountains, seas and so on. It was going to be great only it’s too late now. I wrote most of the first book before the box of legal pads burned up in a fire. But now I have this second longest novel stuck in my head, and before I croak by damn (or other means) it will get finished. It could happen.
Whilst working on the fantasy, I read every fantasy and sci-fi novel I could put my hands on–I have boxes of them in the attic. Even waded through the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I think I won over Dawn Fields (my first long distance editor) when I mentioned reading Gormenghast. Its fans are a hard core club: Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, running some 1,200 pages. What remains in memory is just how much the early story unfolded in the mind of the boy protagonist. What an effort for Peake to carry an interior conversation for that many pages.
Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (the stories edited after his death by his son, Christopher Tolkien aided by Guy Gavriel Kay) was to be the principal story Tolkien intended to write but was sidetracked by Lord of the Rings. There weren’t enough days in a life to write more.
Guy Gavriel Kay is one more Canadian worth reading. There’s an interview on the website Bright Weavings in which he mentions the connection with Tolkien. Thirteen novels; I’ve not read them all but the one that stands out for me is The Lions at Al Rassan, best described as an eulogy for the lost Moorish culture in Spain. It is a masterful work.
“And that’s the truth,” as Edith Ann would say. I hope she’s still rocking in that big ass chair.
When I think about Prince of Tides, I’m struck by how difficult that novel is to fit into a single genre. And I can see where that might be a problem for the publisher–but of course it sold enough books for Barbara Streisand to make a movie of it. The movie had Streisand’s sticky romantic tragedy dripping all over it; the book was less romantic and more–searching. The movie shrunk it down; wrung out what they wanted and dumped the carcass. I’ve not been able to find the back story of how Conroy wrote the screenplay, though supposedly he did; sadly, he’s not around to consult.
To study a writer recognized for their talent may assist in writing a review, like a school book report, but if it doesn’t grab you, what then? Stories that let you live within their pages are rarer than you might think. Even coming from admired writers.
It’s just that you admire the few who pull it off.
Once in a while you may come on a sentence, an entire chapter that jars or disappoints. Or something in the plot lands awkward. The writing may go against a long-held assumption, or has an internal inconsistency–or a logic that falls flat, making you think ‘and your point?’ But you keep looking for those gems and clap gleefully when you find them.
Some writers you know to approach with respect, some deservedly and others not so much. Saul Bellow falls into the latter–as does Hunter Thompson for the same reason: too sparse are the takeaways.
A new-ish Irish author, Sally Rooney, walks on water according to those in the know (aka aficionados). But don’t read Normal People, or if you do, you can stop halfway through as the second half only repeats the first. By the book’s conclusion, I had given up on those two self-absorbed dweebs. Nicely written, but once Rooney had her characters, she didn’t know how to tell them to shut up.
Sorta like having an itch but not completing a good scratching. You’ve been warned.
I went back and forth with early Yeats. Plenty of stylish verse, but he really should have lost Maude the revolutionary decades before he finally stopped pining. For those who may be tempted, repeat after me: “no one is that earth-shatteringly wonderful.!” Hell, with a name like Maude, in my high school she’d have been lucky to get a date. Book after book, there were always a handful of maudlin poems–now you know where the adjective comes from. Oh geez, there she is again. Get a grip, W.B. Leave her be.
Hunter Thompson drank booze, smoked anything and tooted more coke than a rational person should. Yeats just didn’t get out enough–nor did he get enough as a young man, though I wouldn’t know.
Some folks do best being surrounded by family and friends. They seem most comfortable in that kind of setting. Others do better not constantly entrapped. And some are just lazy. When engaged in writing, I’m withdrawn from other people, even as I’m thinking hard about a variety of characters and how to bring them to life. When I’m playing solitaire, I’m just being lazy.
“Write what you know.” Uh huh. Well, you better know something, then.
If Kill Devil ever makes it to print, I’ll give you the one sentence descriptor:
Whose child you are, in which culture you grew to adulthood, what time and place you came from, this is your baggage to carry, and what you chose to do with your load will only take a lifetime to sort out.
Hollywood Cowboy
Back in the 50s and 60s, we in this country wanted to keep driving west. No one wrote about the East Coast except to look back at it, sniff at the dysfunctional clutter, sneer or just catch the next flight. The Beach Boys enshrined California. Henley’s and Frey’s songs were all about a California dream.
Now the story goes everybody’s leaving. The party’s over and the place is on fire.
Last week’s blog “skipped the light fandango” as the Procol Harum song went–much different from tripping it–flash cutting the hell out of various subjects in a rambling collage. What initiated the piece was placing Ross Macdonald up against Joan Didion.
I saw similarities in the California they wrote mourned—more accurately how they wrote about it. Either or both might object to the comparison, but it was fun to put the not-to-be-taken-seriously crime novelist against the high brow intelligentsia girl. Neither had signed up for those roles, I would guess.
One thought I came away with originated with Didion’s essay, Notes From a Native Daughter, reflections on her homeland, California. The essay opens with:
“It’s very easy to sit at the bar in, say La Scala in Beverly Hills, or Ernie’s in San Francisco, and to share in the pervasive delusion that California is only five hours from New York by air. The truth is La Scala and Ernie’s are only five hours from New York by air. California is somewhere else.”
from Notes From a Native Daughter by Joan Didion
She goes on to explain that California’s Central Valley, and more specifically, the northern Sacramento Valley and its agricultural roots, not the coast, is the true heart of California–and that the rugged individualism springing from Hollywood westerns originated there. The mythic Hollywood cowboy was a farmer tilling the soil; who knew. I’m making that last connection since she didn’t come right out and say it. One has to grant an author her knowledge of her home country.
“In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it’s like to come from a place like Sacramento. … California is a place in which a boom mentality and a Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
“Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flights, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that perhaps we could not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because at least in one respect California–the California we are talking about–resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?”
from Notes From a Native Daughter by Joan Didion
Well now. Writing gurus advise that you need to even land paragraphs emphatically. Thusly.
I’ll agree with Didion in so far as when we drove the interior of California, driving south to north on I-5 from LA through the Central Valley, north to Redwood, we saw an altogether different country with different people from the coastal cities, even the coastal villages.
One road trip was to Shelter Cove on the stretch called the Lost Coast over the mountains in and out through Humboldt County. Humboldt County had the look of West Virginia about it, trailers and pickups with gun racks included, adding a layer of malevolent stares from the locals, perhaps distrusting why tourists were passing through, perhaps to steal the marijuana growing everywhere, an altogether other kind of agricultural industry. I hear there are still plenty of ‘unregistered’ growers in Humboldt.
I can see where West Virginia may be heading, now with Virginia legalizing pot. Maybe they’ll stop cutting off the tops of West Virginia mountains and take up producing marijuana for the coming Northern Virginia market. It would be a hell of a ride getting to Humboldt from here.
From one of those California trips, the image that stuck with me became the poem, Jenner.
Jenner California—photo by Ramkumar Menon
Lovely as a Tree
Ever study trees closely? Notice how so many are disformed? The obvious ones hacked by street crews clearing power lines–tortured for being in the way? Or hacked by other trees giving up and falling over? Or dumped with snow and ice heavier than they’re able to support, so a major limb or two get ripped away? They carry their scars in silence.
Birds will light on the smallest branches, chirp and fly away, light as feathers, free as… Trees don’t get to grow more than a few inches from where their seeds were planted.
After enough time’s passed, most will disguise the scars given them by the world. Come summer, the foliage masks a great deal, but in the bare seasons before the buds open, they seem like old queens in drag. Like the scene in Bird Cage with Nathan Lane sitting in his dressing room sans wig moaning to Robin Williams he’s just an old queen. Some trees can be that poignant.
There’s a strong similarity between young gay men and Hollywood starlets–how swiftly they age. So should they be mourned for their lost youth or admired for making it this far? Ditto the trees.
A WP article on Sunday talked of an industry few people have heard of outside of where it’s happening–thus the excuse for a feature article–harvesting pine straw shipped north and sold for ground cover. The ‘brown gold’ that falls from pine trees in North Carolina by Todd C. Frankel.
My sister and I both found the article amusing for all the Saturdays as kids we spent raking pine straw into piles for garbage pickup. Mountains of the stuff. And pine cones I used to throw at other kids and vice versa–people buy them for Christmas ornaments.
Our house sat on a quarter-acre lot in Sumter yet had a small forest of long-needle pines, gaunt, skinny trees all straining upright for the light. That entire sandy part of South Carolina was covered in pine. I don’t remember cherishing the smell of a pine forest was so much until I’d moved away and came back years later. In fact, it’s a fine, fine smell.
Recently I googled the street where we grew up, followed the google street view past our house, and was sad to see the pines had been‘disappeared,’ nary a one left in the yard. What Hurricane Hugo didn’t snatch in ‘89, the owners have since cut down.
The house looks smaller for their loss. Someone’s enclosed the side screen porch we slept on when it was hot, but they’ve left the three-pole decoration I’d twine with Christmas lights. I used to deliver newspapers through that entire neighborhood. If I passed that way again, I wonder who’d greet me at the door?